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Cities of Change Back

Cities of Change

Cities, including smaller municipalities, are often the places where positive change occurs; that is an example and is meaningful for Europe as a shared space. Being at the intersections of the most pressing social, environmental and economic problems, (informal) city networks make real collaborations possible, involving citizens directly in decision-making processes and shaping policies. They bring bottom-up, democratic and inclusive alternatives for sustainable futures with equal opportunities for all. ECF is the coordinator of three multi-annual programmes co-funded by the EU,  that connect dozens of European cities and their actors in culture and media. ECF also participates in the “Cities of Change Funders network” of EDGE to share knowledge and shift philanthropic resources to systemic alternatives in cities. 

Culture for Solidarity

The European Cultural Foundation, Rijeka 2020 European Capital of CultureKrytyka Polityczna and ZEMOS98 invited everybody to apply for participation in Culture Lab Europe. The event was planned to take place in April in Rijeka, Croatia, but was postponed to June 2020 due to the Covid-19 crisis.

You can find the online programme, the participants, and background information here.

Culture lab Europe is part of the project Culture for Solidarity, a 2.5-year artistic investigation into the root causes of fragmentation in Europe. It is co-funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme. The aim is to encourage greater solidarity, by highlighting cultural practices that bring unusual groups of people together, connecting these practices and scaling them across the continent.

MediActivism

MediActivism has developed as a network of young media-makers and critics across Europe who strive for an inclusive public European media-infrastructure. Media has a role in improving the public spaces that we inhabit in our cities. Ten partner organisations in citizens’-, refugee and inclusive media jointly develop practices and tools for a more inclusive media-sphere in Europe, while focusing on urban issues that are shared across the different cities they are working in.

MediActivism.eu consists of a series of activities happening in different cities of Europe: a Hackcamp, a format of encounter oriented to face challenges by designing prototypes that give an answer to the needs of the local context; a Right to the City Laboratory, a group of diverse participants to implement a campaign claiming the demands of citizenship; and a Policy Fora to foster changes in our cities’ policies regarding the right to the city. These activities happening in different local contexts are connected and scaled up to encourage a broader discussion in the European public sphere.

MediActivism.eu sustains an ever-growing collection of 500+ alternative media created by active citizens, artists and civil society groups from across Europe. This archive includes short films, remixes, mixed media, music videos, social commentaries, animations and artworks that document Europe’s most pressing social issues.

The publication ‘Our City, Our Home’ has its origins in ‘Mediactivism’, a collaboration of eight organisations from across Europe: Les Têtes de l’Art from Marseilles, Fanzingo from Botkyrka, ZEMOS98 from Seville, Kurziv from Zagreb, Krytyka Polityczna from Warsaw and a coalition of three organisations from Turin: YEPP Italia, Banda Larga and Visionary Days. Each organisation has a background in media-making, alternative education and an interest in urban issues.

For two years, these organisations have developed a shared ap- proach to activism that addresses right to the city issues through media-making. They found ways of using podcasting, digital mapping, filmmaking and many other techniques to raise and support campaigns dealing with touristification, the privatisation of public space, insecure housing and inclusive urban development.

This resulting collection of essays looks at these issues from a European perspective.

Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities

Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities (CCSC) is a joint project with ten partners across Europe that aims to increase citizen’s participation in the creation of cultural policies in cities. CCSC works on more sustainable and inclusive cities by making culture and creativity more central to policy-making by experimenting with participatory forms of cooperation between cultural organizations and policymakers.

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